In a move that is no surprise to anyone, Socialist Appeal has come out in defence of the racist Howard Beckett, the Deputy Secretary-General of Unite and Len McCluskey’s hand-picked successor. He was suspended after he tweeted calling for Priti Patel to be deported instead of refugees. If this was a prominent figure on the … Read more
The Socialist Equality Party, the American Trotskyist cult that was formerly the American branch of Gerry Healy’s organisation, has come out in defence of the anti-Semitic Bristol Professor David Miller. I cannot find an official statement on the issue by the IMT, SP or SWP, though I did find a statement from one of the … Read more
Trotskyists always deny that Trotsky bears any responsibility for the horrors of Stalinism. It is entirely the fault of the ‘objective conditions’. That Trotsky assisted Lenin in suppressing the working-class, establishing a one-party state and crushing all opposition within the party itself are facts which are overlooked. All of this paved the way for the … Read more
Trotskyists are fond of saying that the USSR wasn’t ‘real socialism’. They have any number of excuses – economic and cultural backwardness, imperialist encirclement, counter-revolution, diplomatic isolation, etc. They are convinced that this was unique to the experience of Russia, and that other revolutions in the ‘advanced’ countries of the West will not have faced … Read more
I made this blog for those doubting members of Trotskyist cults who are reconsidering their commitments. It would make sense, then, to make a post advising all those who find themselves having second thoughts about their involvement with the sordid sects of which they are a member. Here are some of the things to watch … Read more
‘So far I have been discussing an ideal totalitarian society, of which the existing ones are (or were) only more or less successful approximations. Later Stalinism (like Maoism) was a reasonably fair approximation. Its triumph consisted not simply in that virtually everything in the Soviet Union was either falsified or suppressed—statistics, historical events, current events, … Read more
In the IMT, I was always taught that Lenin and Trotsky had conducted a heroic battle against anti-Semitism, and that it was revived by the evil Stalin as part of the ‘bureaucratic counter-revolution’ that reversed many of the ‘gains’ of the Russian Revolution. I had no idea of the Bolsheviks’ early efforts to stamp out … Read more
None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right. . . . [I]f the Party adopts a decision which … Read more